Page 332 - A Little Life: A Novel

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WHEN JACOB WAS very small, maybe six months old or so, Liesl came down
with pneumonia. Like most healthy people, she was a terrible sick person:
grouchy and petulant and, mostly, stunned by the unfamiliar place in which
she now found herself. “I don’t get sick,” she kept saying, as if some
mistake had been made, as if what had been given her had been meant for
someone else.
Because Jacob was a sickly baby—not in any dramatic way, but he had

already had two colds in his short life, and even before I knew what his
smile looked like, I knew what his cough sounded like: a surprisingly
mature hack—we decided that it would be better if Liesl spent the next few
days at Sally’s to rest and get better, and I stayed at home with Jacob.
I thought myself basically competent with my son, but over the course of

the weekend, I must have called my father twenty times to ask him about
the various little mysteries that kept presenting themselves, or to confirm
with him what I knew I knew but which, in my fluster, I had forgotten: He
was making strange noises that sounded like hiccups but were too irregular
to actually be hiccups—what were they? His stool was a little runny—was
that a sign of anything? He liked to sleep on his stomach, but Liesl said that
he should be on his back, and yet I had always heard that he’d be perfectly

fine on his stomach—would he be? Of course, I could’ve looked all of this
up, but I wanted definitive answers, and I wanted to hear them from my
father, who had not just the right answers but the right way of delivering
them. It comforted me to hear his voice. “Don’t worry,” he said at the end
of every call. “You’re doing just fine. You know how to do this.” He made
me believe I did.

After Jacob got sick, I called my father less: I couldn’t bear to talk to
him. The questions I now had for him—how would I get through this?;
what would I do, afterward?; how could I watch my child die?—were ones
I couldn’t even bring myself to ask, and ones I knew would make him cry to
try to answer.
He had just turned four when we noticed that something was wrong.
Every morning, Liesl would take him to nursery school, and every